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“We’re delivering to the hospitals, getting the doctors and nurses the equipment they need,” Spero said.

Drivers
have also run into new roadblocks in this new normal, Spero said.

“Some
customers won’t let us in the building. Other customers will let us in the
building, but we’re confined to a small area. We can’t even go and wash our
hands and use the facilities,” he said.

Grabbing a meal on the job is not as easy right now either. “Everything is curbside pick-up. It’s not easy to pull a tractor-trailer truck alongside the curb and have someone bring out food to you,” said Spero.

“If we didn’t have truck drivers right now, we would be looking at empty store shelves permanently,” said Joe Sculley, a spokesperson for the Motor Transport Association of Connecticut, which represents thousands of trucking industry workers in our state.

Sculley
described some of the drastic changes for truck drivers during the pandemic.

“There
is literally no traffic on the road,” said Sculley. “There’s no one out there
to slow them down. They can go 55 (miles per hour) instead of 35 even in
southwest Connecticut on I-95, so, that’s a good thing.”

Economic
experts said while trucking related to some retail, restaurant and hospitality
businesses has slowed as of late, the demands on the trucking industry remain
high.

“All this stuff comes on a truck and it’s a good thing the trucks are coming otherwise we’d be in an even worse spot than we are right now,” Sculley said.